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The “Oscars” of management thinkers were announced this week, with two Torontonians — influential voices in business and innovation — ranked in the top five.

Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management and academic director of the Martin Prosperity Institute, and Don Tapscott, currently a Rotman professor and fellow at the Martin Institute, were ranked third and fourth, respectively, on the Thinkers50 list.

This year’s rankings represent a step up for both men and demonstrate Canada’s growing presence among global thinkers. The list, founded in 2001 and released every two years, had Martin in sixth place and Tapscott in ninth place in 2011.

Fellow Canadian Sydney Finkelstein, the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in the U.S., came in at No. 43, while American-born urbanist Richard Florida, the Martin Institute’s director, was ranked at No. 25.

This year’s list includes a variety of university professors, business leaders and consultants, featuring such other notables as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (No. 34).

“It’s a nice show for Canada … it’s very gratifying,” said Martin, known for his work on integrative thinking to solve complex problems. His book Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, co-authored with Proctor & Gamble’s A. G. Lafley, won this year’s Thinkers50 Book Award.

Martin also holds the Premier’s Chair in Productivity & Competiveness at Rotman. He doesn’t envision slowing down any time soon: he has published eight books and there’s a book on social entrepreneurship in the works.

“I don’t think (the ranking) will change much about what I do,” he said. “I’ve been writing on management and have been consulting with CEOs for years and I’ll continue to do that.”

When asked what he believes is the biggest challenge currently facing Toronto, Martin said it relates to infrastructure. The challenge presents an either/or situation in which neither choice is very palatable, which is where integrative thinking comes in.

“Toronto can either forget about trying to build infrastructure and let Toronto get even more congested, or we can spend lots on that infrastructure and go into debt because we don’t have the financial resources,” he said.

Martin said the challenge doesn’t necessarily require a compromise.

“We teach our students the process for working through that, and that process is to explore existing models and take from those existing models,” he said. “When people come up with these creative, out-of-the-box ideas, you’ll find that they are rarely out-of-the-box.”

Martin’s colleague, Tapscott, is well-known for being one of the leading voices on the impact of technology on business and society. A sought-after speaker in the business world, he was the recipient of this year’s Thinkers50 Global Solutions Award.

Tapscott, who has written or co-written 14 books and coined the phrase “digital economy,” is now hard at work on what he describes as his greatest endeavour yet and what he envisions will be his legacy: the Global Solution Networks study.

As traditional institutions are finding it increasing difficulty to solve global problems, Tapscott and his team are looking at the networks that have emerged and have been facilitated by the rise of the Internet and that include all stakeholder voices in order to find new solutions to old problems.

“How extraordinary that something like this is going on, and it’s never been investigated to try to understand what makes these things tick. How can we make them better? How can governments and companies embrace them?”

He said what Toronto, like so many other cities, needs is a complete revamp of all its institutions — from schools to power grids to city council — which he said are still Industrial Age institutions that need to be brought into the 21st century.

“We need to rebuild them around a network model, and around a new set of principles which are about collaboration, openness, integrity, interdependence and understanding that business can’t succeed in a world that’s failing,” he said.

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